Planning the Next Great Migration

Hi folks - I'm skipping ahead again to start presenting individual states in the Southeast, beginning with Tennessee because a reader expressed interest in it in a private conversation.

Tennessee is one of the more promising parts of this region if you want, or don’t mind, a very right-wing government. The U.S. Census Bureau reports population growth in most of its counties, not only the urban counties, which suggests that smaller towns are doing a good job of being livable for their residents. Geographically and culturally it has much in common with Kentucky, but there are more towns of moderate size where a migrant might find a home, and it appears to be better managed in some ways that will become important in future. On the downside (IMHO), partly because state law makes it easy to use public parks as one pleases, the state has become a meeting place for hordes of white nationalists.

The Nashville metro area exceeds 2 million people (extending to such cities as Hendersonville and Murfreesboro), and the Memphis region 1.3 million. Though Knoxville and Chattanooga have fewer than 200,000 people each, the surrounding metro area is over 860,000 for the former, 540,000 for the latter. Most migrants will wish to avoid all of these as too large. More acceptable places might include the following:

I’m continuing to skip around in presenting text from my book. Since I haven’t yet been able to post it as a free PDF, I do want to make all of the text (modified for Internet) available. However, I want to skip over some of my grim introductory discussion of the political collapse of the United States in order to get faster into the most important part, which is, if you can’t stay where you are, where should you go? So the following text presupposes some argument to the effect that we’re on the verge of a civil war and the breakup of the Union may follow, and some discussion of others’ views of the geographic divisions in American culture. I will go back to those topics at some point.

I mentioned last week my desire to talk back to Eliza Daley’s essay about reruralization, reprinted on Resilience.org. (If you’re reading this, you almost certainly know about Resilience.org, but if not, it’s a very interesting site.) Daley’s been writing for a while about creating a sustainable future and I have a lot of respect for many of her perspectives. So let me start by enumerating the very important major points on which I agree with her:

1. It certainly does not make sense to try to attain sustainability by getting as many potentially displaced people as possible to move into already oversized cities.

2. As the future progresses, the decline of affordable fossil fuels will create an increasing need to reduce the energy put into food production, in terms of calories burned per calorie of food obtained. This will presumably entail more reliance on human labor.

3. Long-term transport, especially of refrigerated foods, will also become harder to afford, making it sensible for more consumers to live closer to agriculturally productive areas. Growing perishable foods hydroponically or by other hi-tech means in urban areas will be too resource-intensive to substitute at a large scale.

4. Many urbanites have unreasonable prejudices against both rural culture and the physical conditions of rural living that are not fully centered in reality. On the other hand, we also agree that rural society includes a significant contingent of “obnoxious young men ... with their enormous trucks and their neck beards and their assault rifles and their flaming insecurities,” and that these might not be the greatest neighbors for some kinds of people.

However, she also makes some assertions with which I strongly disagree:

1. “[H]umans have generally not grown food in urban environments.”

2. “Loud folks” who do not want to become some type of farmworker (more on that soon) are lazy, spoiled urbanites. They “don’t want ... to work.” They “don’t want ... to live without ... someone else doing most of their body’s work.” If you “like to eat,” you should have to do farm labor, because “If you are not doing this work for yourself, someone else has to do it for you.”

3. “If urban areas can’t sustainably feed us, then billions of people need to move. Now.”

Let me address each of these in turn:

In my last post, I summarized Joseph Tainter’s view of the collapse of numerous historical civilizations. His conclusion that complex powerful societies continue to add complexity until its net benefits become negative, which then leads to rapid decomplexification or “collapse,” is surely oversimplified as a single universal explanation, but also surely not irrelevant. We should, therefore, think about the implications for our own, uniquely hypercomplex society.

Eliza Daley has just posted an interesting essay, reprinted on Resilience.org, that I’d like to both recommend and talk back to. Since her view of the situation in overlarge cities and the need for deurbanization is tangential to mine, I’d first like to hop back to the topic of unsustainability and post a few more sections of my general view of the problems our society is facing. Climate change is the most urgent, because in some places it’s already bad and heading rapidly towards disastrous. However, it turns out that this is just a special case of a larger phenomenon—what I call Tier 2 collapse—which says that a society built on growth, like ours, must eventually find some consequence of its way of life putting the squeeze on it. The people who have examined this most rationally believe that even if there was no such thing as climate change—or ocean acidification—decline in the relatively near future would still be unavoidable under any business-as-usual model. Here’s a brief summary of their conclusions.

Readers who would like to get 104,000 words (counting references) of my highly opinionated opinions all at once can now obtain an eBook version of Planning the Next Great Migration for 99 cents from the Amazon Kindle store here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8T9F8BX/ref=sr_1_1

I recognize that this solution has many imperfections. Most importantly, you must have a Kindle to read it, and I don’t have a Kindle, because I loathe those revolting little gadgets. But a lot of people do have them, and I felt a sense of urgency to start trying to get my message out the fastest way I could, because even though I’m something of a doomer, these days, bad things always seem to happen faster than I think they will.

It could not be made available free through Amazon (Bezos ain’t running a charity here, he’s got a lot of alimony to pay), but it is labeled as Creative Commons-licensed for free noncommercial distribution. The next hoop for me to jump through is creating the files for a paperback print-on-demand version, which may have to wait until I can take a few vacation days, because I believe that anything worth writing is worth printing out on paper. (Whether this was worth writing will ultimately be up to people other than myself; for the moment, leave me my illusions, thanks!) The Kindle version cover could easily be attached to the paperback text PDF to make a freely distributable PDF version, but I do not know of a good free website where I could put that file and provide a permanent link to it. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I’ve been asked to skip ahead and dive into the lists of potentially promising destination towns in specific states, and will start doing so. That will mean skipping over a lot of explanatory text about which parts of the country are most sustainable and able to accept more people, what I think their politics will be if the Union falls apart, why secular democrats shouldn’t let themselves get crowded into blue bantustans, what internet resources are available to do your own searching for personally attractive destinations, and so forth. I’ll go back and prepare those sections piecemeal later.

For now, though, I think I do need to comment a bit on my criteria. You may find online lists of “the best places to live in Ohio” or wherever, many or most of which will have been omitted by my search strategy, and you’ll wonder why I didn’t draw from those lists. Much of the reason is because my criteria are different: those lists are aimed at the upper-middle-class who can live wherever they like, whereas my target audience includes the lower-middle-class and downwardly mobile, who first and foremost need a community where they can keep a roof over their heads in a worsening future. For my purposes, a cheap town with several active factories is better than a picturesque and marvelously crime-free town. But if cost isn’t a consideration for you (you lucky person), you may wish to look elsewhere for guidance.

In the last post I talked about the fact that the ecological collapse of the Southwest is already starting. That process is now irreversible, given the long-term drought that is the predicted result of climate change. At most, a wet year here and there will put off catastrophe for a few years; it will not reverse the trend that must, probably sooner than we think, lead to the virtual abandonment of overgrown desert cities such as Las Vegas. The climate-related problems other threatened regions of the U.S. face are not quite so imminent, but because they are grave, Americans would be wise to avoid moving to those regions, and to consider moving out if they are already there.

Industrial civilization faces multiple levels of problems, from the specific to the general. Our single most urgent specific problem is climate change, which we have caused, and which is already troublesome and getting worse. We’ve been warned for decades that climate change would have harmful effects around the world. While many wallowed in denial, most of the rest of us comforted ourselves that the bad things would happen much later, decades or centuries from now, or somewhere else, in poorer nations. After the last two years, with extreme-weather records being smashed regularly and hundreds of people dying as a result, anyone who is paying attention knows that climate disruption is real, it is happening now, and it’s happening around the world, including right here. Let's explore some of the sober scientific predictions of our future.